Taking advantage of Imac s/pdif.. how??

[luism]

Finally got an imac to work on my music.. but I was wondering, how could i use the spdif output that comes built in with the regular headphone out put thats built into the imac?
Do I need a special plugin to take advanatage of that and if so which one is recommended.

Thanks

[CME]

Yes. You would need a optical cable with an adapter that looks kind of like an 1/8 plug. Some home theater optical cables come with the adapter. I have a couple of sets that had it. You plug that into the iMac and then run the other end to your DAC. You may have to do some tweaking in the settings to make sure you're putting out the right type of signal to the DAC. Can't help much there. I've only briefly played with that when playing back a DVD on my MBP to a surround sound system. And most DAC's used for recording don't support those formats. But I'm pretty sure you can set it up for just a stereo spdif signal. And that should work.


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[John_Toolbox]

Check eBay. You can either buy an 1/8" to toslink adaptor for around $2, or a cable with the 1/8" optical on one end and toslink on the other.

I have a box made by hosa that converts the optical spdif to aes/ebu... Been using this setup for a few years and it works great.

I haven't looked into it for a while, but afaik the home theater surround format can not be converted to anything else like adat 8ch format, so you are stuck with just 2 channel spdif using this method with pro audio interfaces. Pretty sure it can do up to 192khz though, at least on the more recent macs.

[luism]

Thank you for the replies.. I have a basic studio setup mainly to be used for remixing purposes.. I want to get the most mileage that my Imac can give..:)
I wanted to get the best fidelity to output to a pair of yamaha studio self amplified monitors.. I saw some converters starting at 2k ..ouch.. So maybe for now I will just stick to using a stereo plugin to 2 male XLR connectors Left and Right.. ?

[John_Toolbox]

If you don't have an audio interface with a digital input, yeah, that's about all you can do.

You can probably get something decent for a lot less than 2k, look at the mbox 3 series and other similarly priced interfaces.

[CME]

If you're looking just for a couple channels basic I/O I'd consider the new mboxes, apogee duet 2, and sound designs USBpre2. All fairly inexpensive with quality converters.


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[luism]

Thanks for the heads up guys :)

[luism]

hey guys, would buying the Digidesign 888 Interface benefit me? could i make this work with the imac and PT 10?

Thanks

[CME]

Don't think so. I'm not familiar with those but think they only work with process cards which are either pci or PCIe. Neither of which an iMac has.


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[John_Toolbox]

No, 888s only work either with a mix pci card(pt 6.4.1 or older) or as additional io for an HD tdm system using a blue interface (pt8 or older)